I spent the evening web designing. My secretive California friend has a website that screams 1997. Modernizing means rebuilding from the ground up. He has given me no guidance.
I created a new directory on a shared server I rent, opened a database and connected it to WordPress. Within five minutes I’d spawned a very sterile website with dummy content.
My job is simple. Change the look of the site. It needs to match his business. All this is done with a language called CSS, for cascading style sheets.
Here’s a small sample.
.site-header h1 a {
font-family: ‘Life Savers’, cursive;
font-size: 140px;
font-size: 10rem;
font-weight:500;
text-align:center;
}
Sometimes all I’m doing is modifying the original sterile design. Often I’m writing code from scratch, adding new elements of style that didn’t exist.
I’m slow, but getting faster–more confident. I still suffer from ‘coder’s block’. It takes a long time to get motivated enough to go at it.
When I’m in the moment it’s very stimulating. It’s a creative process like writing. It’s satisfying work.
I hope he likes the finished product.
Definitely check out Starkers WordPress theme if you’re working on WordPress. I found it useful to do custom CSS on this without trying to strip away an existing theme.
I use TwentyTwelve with a custom child theme.
I absolutely agree that it’s stimulating. I don’t design often, but when I do create a logo or website I have to be “in the moment” creatively or I dont make anything nice. However, when im feeling create it just flows and makes it so much easier.
Geoff, what do you use to code with? Even GUI editors like Dreamweaver have great code editing modes that provide lots of shortcut/hint drop downs for tags and attributes in HTML and CSS. Not only is it a time saver, but a great way to learn all that these languages have to offer. I use Dreamweaver (in code view) and even an old Macromedia HTML/text editor called Homesite.